My new book, How To Sauté, publishes tomorrow and Little Brown is giving away the whole set (which includes How To Roast and How To Braise). Enter here for your chance to win— May 23rd is the last day. Or order now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or from Indiebound. People familiar with my work know my conviction that mastering a single technique is better than having a hundred recipes. So I’ve devoted these short books to the finer points of the critical techniques. Sauté is the most used of all techniques and the nuances of it are many. Whether it’s in the preparing of veal scallopine, a classical poulet sauté, shrimp, or a flatiron steak, each sauté is a little different. I discuss types of pans, cooking tools, cooking fats, the critical herbs and aromatics Read On »

(First published in Finesse, Thomas Keller’s superb magazine, earlier this year.) In the 1970s, the egg was bad-for-you food in America. After being a mainstay of the human diet for millennia, doctors here decreed that the cholesterol-laden yolk clogged arteries and resulted in heart attacks. Eat an egg if you must, nutritionists warned, but only in limited quantities. And after 30 years of telling us to avoid eggs and order up those egg white omelettes, the American Heart Association changed its mind—oops!—and declared that eggs, like an unjustly punished child, could once again return to the dining table. As I began to write about the egg, I realized the egg fatwa was no isolated event. Indeed, it came to symbolize for me what was wrong with the way we think about food and how we let others decide what we eat. Read On »

Happy Friday, all. Reposting this cocktail as I’ve been ordering it recently and enjoying it immensely. It remains a perfect cocktail for a chilly spring evening. I love how various flavoring components (bitters, vermouths) become different cocktails when you change the spirit. How the Manhattan becomes a Rob Roy when you change the bourbon to scotch (as opposed to a lame-sounding “Scotch Manhattan”), or how a Martini becomes a … um, never mind about that #lostcause (Paulius, can we hope for Darwinian selection here?). I love the elasticity of a solid cocktail, how the addition of apple brandy turns a Clover Club into a Pink Lady. Here, one of my favorite cocktails, the Negroni, becomes a Boulevardier when bourbon replaces the gin. A couple of recent essays (Tmagblog, Imbibe) have wondered why this cocktail isn’t Read On »

It’s bacon time again! I don’t know why but I’ve been getting a lot of bacon questions in my email recently, so thought I’d address a few issues I haven’t before. Of course, I’ve long commented on the fact that curing your own bacon is no more difficult than marinating a steak. Mix all the ingredients together and put them in a plastic bag with the meat. Use the recipe below. The aromatics, the bay leaves and everything else below can be considered optional. But there are other strategies. You could make a brine if you feel more comfortable with that. For those of you concerned about reaching the right salt and pink salt levels, you could use a technique called equilibrium brining, which I first read about in Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine. To Read On »

Mom’s Day is important. Dads, sons, and daughters, undervalue it at your own peril. It’s May 8th. For those of you with wives and moms who love to cook, Mac Dalton and I have put together a special bundle we think all cooking moms will appreciate (no meat grinders and stuffers and smokers!). Moms, if you’re the ones reading this, feel free to send to husbands (we can be slow on the uptake). We’ve decided to include the bamboo scrubber for the giver of this gift—if Mom is doing the cooking, you’ll find this comes in handy after. The Mom’s Day Bundle— 2 spankettes (the best wood spoons EVER) Badass (aka Egg) spoon A set of offset basting-tasting spoons A small bamboo scrubber (no more sponges gunked up with cheese, dough, egg, scorched milk!) An Read On »